Towards The Pantheon Devlog #21: Right Back At It!

It has been about 2 months since the last devlog, but I'm back! After working 14 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, I started getting burned out. Combined with some personal issues, I decided that I needed to take a break from working on the game. Now that I'm refreshed and excited again, it's time for an update!

Leandro has almost finished all of the art for the game. Having all the art for the game completed will be a huge milestone for development, and some of the artwork that remains to be finished will make for great pixel art videos which we will be sharing in the future!

I estimate that overall development of Towards The Pantheon is at around 50% completion. Here are a few notes about the current state of development:

Aside from the mansion section, the game is playable start to finish

Over 2000 sprites, tilesets, backgrounds, and other pieces of art are being used inside the engine

Over 250 levels have been made for the game (not including mansion levels)

Now what is left is mostly creative work; writing character dialog, writing NPC dialog, adding fancy attack effects, polishing up anything rough around the edges, lots of testing and balancing, recording sound effects and finishing the soundtrack, and preparing for release. This means that devlogs from now on will be somewhat infrequent, since I will have nothing to write about if I spend a month working on character dialog. Myself and Leandro livestreamed 3.5 hours of work today though, and I will continue to livestream work when I can. I am working a summer job at the moment which will result in my livestreams being less frequent during the week, but I will livestream often during the weekend. I plan to livestream a lot of soundtrack work as I've had a lot of fun interacting with people in the chat while working on music in the past.

Now that the game is fully playable, it has really taken shape. The work that lies ahead is the game development work that I find most interesting and enjoyable, so I look forward to digging into it. That being said, I'm also making an effort to avoid getting burned out again, which means development will be a little bit slower but more steady. I'm still aiming for release by the end of the year, but if the game is not up to my standards at that time then I am comfortable with delaying it if need be. Although devlogs will be a bit more infrequent, be sure to follow the project on our various social media pages as I will continue to post updates whenever I have something new to share!

Thank you to everyone who has supported the project, I really appreciate it! I'm blown away that we were Greenlit on Steam in just 13 days, that the amount of people who are following the project continues to grow, and that the game is finally at my favorite phase of development. There's a lot to be excited about and a lot of work to do, and I look forward to hearing what you think when I have new screenshots, soundtrack demos, and devlogs to share!

ThataEUR(TM)s it for this devlog, if there are any topics about the game and its development that youaEUR(TM)d like me to cover in a future devlog or in upcoming behind the scenes videos, be sure to let me know!